Out of the Frying Pan And Into the Antipodes--The Loves, The Lovers and Some of the Recipes(Some names & places have been changed to protect the guilty)

Thursday, 5 January 2017

Killing Vegetables or Salad Heaven? La Frisée

Killing Vegetables Or Salad Heaven?

La
Frisée

1973. It’s a frosty autumn evening in
Paris. Gégé takes me down the road to the market to get something for dinner.
As usual, the little market stalls are glowing with light, the wonderfully
fresh produce on his favourite greengrocer’s stall like bright jewels. Not these
or those—he takes me inside the tiny shop.

Baisser le zinc?

It has now dawned that these little
shops are what must have been meant by the incomprehensible expression “baisser le zinc” in those serious French
literary works I had to read for my M.A. Baisser
le… Huh? My dictionary was no use whatsoever. What they are, you see, are
tiny permanent shops, a fraction the size of the ones I’m used to back home,
just wide enough for a counter running lengthwise down the shop, away from the
entrance, and floor space for maybe two ranks of customers. No bigger, in fact,
than a garage back home. And that’s the clue. Le zinc is the big roller door they pull down, completely closing off
the shop, at the end of the morning’s or evening’s trading. Large amounts of their
wares are displayed on stands outside the shop, the pavement being plenty wide
enough for it, and all of this is brought inside at closing time. Then down
comes the door, and it’s locked at its foot.

Just lately ram-raiding of Aussie shops has been in the news. Moans from
shopkeepers about having to keep replacing their “security”—at the most, a
light grille over the large plate glass window, call that security? One hefty
garage roller door would do it. Never mind the daft romantic image of Paris
purveyed to the Anglophone community by the popular media for something like
150 years: the French are characterised by their common sense.

La Frisée

Gégé’s favourite greengrocer, a burly,
dark-haired, ruddy-cheeked man in an apron, greets him happily and unerringly
identifies me, very proud of himself, as l’Écossaise.
Er—yeah. Close but no cigar—I do have some Scottish ancestors. And as it’s a
cold night my cheeks are pink, the square jaw could be Scottish (it’s certainly
not French) and I’m wearing my heavy scarlet winter coat, years old but the
heaviest coat I own, and, uh, yeah. Pretty good going, really, for a man who’s
lived in a tiny quartier of Paris all
his life and speaks almost incomprehensible parigot.

Gégé inspects the salad vegetables—he always buys them fresh right
before he intends eating them. And they are fresh, incredibly fresh. They must
have been trucked in before dawn to the wholesale markets (no longer Les
Halles, as in Zola, there’s a big hole where they used to be, familiarly known
as le trou des Halles), and bought by
this man shortly after dawn. Gégé points out the ones he fancies.

Palest yellowy-lime curlicues glow within a circlet of darker lime
fronds, shading out to dark green… Gosh.
It’s the most beautiful vegetable I ever saw! What is it?

La Frisée: Curly Endive or Escarole

It’s la frisée, of course!

I’m none the wiser. We don’t have that back home. Is it a lettuce?
Unfortunately I don’t phrase this right and he informs me it’s not
a laitue, it’s une frisée! Er—right. A laitue
is the rather soft-leaved, tender pale green lettuce he sometimes buys: I’ve
had that. So isn’t there a generic word for lettuce? I don’t ask, just watch while
Gégé selects the best one.

The subsequent salad has to be tasted to be believed. Out
of this world!

Salade de frisée

1 good-sized
frisée (curly endive) with plenty of
pale inner leaves

3-4
tablespoons of Gégé’s vinaigrette (below)

1. Pull the
curly endive apart and wash the leaves really well, making sure you get all the
grit off. Discard the very coarse outer leaves and any bent ones. Trim the
ends. Drain and dry carefully. At this stage the leaves may be put into a
plastic bag and kept in the fridge for no more than an hour until just ready to
serve.

2. When
ready for the salad course, tear the larger leaves into two or three pieces
cross-wise (do NOT cut with a knife). Put leaves into a large salad bowl which
seems too big for them. Add 3-4 tablespoons of the vinaigrette, well shaken.
Take to the table without tossing.

3. Just
before serving, toss well.

Serves 4-6.

One of my favourite salads, but you have
to like bitter things. It’s especially good after a heavy winter main course
such as Pieds de porc aux lentilles.

For God’s sake don’t follow the example of
those sickening cookery gurus on TV and toss the salad with your hands. Use salad
servers or a large spoon and a fork. Warm hands are sudden death to fresh green
leaves. Not to mention the fact that they’re covered in germs.

Gégé’s Vinaigrette

Gégé never
bothered to measure the quantities, of course. The proportions are about 5 to
1, and this amount (about 1 1/2 cups) may be kept indefinitely in a cupboard.
Never put it in the fridge.

1 1/4 cups
olive oil

1/4 cup good
wine vinegar (e.g. Belgian red wine vinegar)

1 rounded
teaspoon salt

1 1/2 good
teaspoons Dijon mustard (e.g. Maille)

Use a bottle
(or jar) with a really tight lid. Put in the vinegar, then the salt and
mustard. Put the lid on and shake hard until ingredients are amalgamated. Then
add the oil. Seal tightly to keep.

To serve:

Just before
you take the salad to the table, shake the bottle hard until the oil and
vinegar mix to what looks like a cloudy amalgam. Add about 1 to 2 tablespoons
of the dressing per person to the salad (depending on how large the salad is.)
If the salad is a leafy one, don’t toss it until it is on the table ready to be
eaten.

Don’t kid yourself: this is the only way to make good vinaigrette
dressing. The addition of any other ingredient at all turns it into an
abortion.

Horrors!

Never mind Jane Grigson’s claims for
its ancestry, the British today (including the citizens of the Commonwealth)
cannot make vinaigrette! Here is what she says:

"We call this most useful of sauces, French dressing or
vinaigrette, and occasionally talk about it as if it was something Elizabeth
David brought to England ... at the end of the 1940s. In fact it has been
around since the eighteenth century, and Hannah Glasse gives what might seem a
very modem salad - broccoli, boiled and cold with a dressing of oil and
vinegar. ‘Garnish with Stertion buds’ (Nasturtium buds were pickled as a
substitute for capers). She is referring to purple or green-sprouting broccoli,
which does make an excellent salad."

(Jane Grigson. English food, 1974. Penguin ed. p. 290)

I’m sure it does make an excellent
salad, but Jane doesn’t give a recipe
for it—nor any for broccoli in that book, that I can see. Her recipe for
"French dressing" is AWFUL: it contains sugar and the "French
mustard" is optional.

The English-language recipes for vinaigrette dressing don’t get better
over the next four decades.

More Horrors: Killing Curly Endive

And la frisée? Well, in the 1970s, at the time Gégé introduced me to
it, it was unknown in Australasia. I have found a recipe for it in an English
cookery book from 1891—but mind you, it was a vegetarian book, the contemporary
readers would have expected its recipes to include some odd vegetables.
“Lettuce” was iceberg lettuce in New Zealand and Australia for years: curly
endive, together with other fancy varieties, pretty well vanished from the
Anglophone consciousness for a century. Small wonder when you consider what we
were advised to do with it back then!

Endives come
into season long before lettuces, and are much used abroad for making salads.
The drawback to endive is that it is tough, and the simple remedy is to boil
it.

Take three
or four white-heart endives, throw them into boiling water slightly salted.
When they get tender take them out and instantly throw them into cold water, by
which means you preserve their colour.

When quite
cold, take them out again, drain them, dry them thoroughly, and pull them to
pieces with the fingers. Now place them in a salad-bowl, keeping the whitest
part as much as possible at the top.

Place some
hard-boiled eggs round the edge, and sprinkle a little chopped blanched parsley
over the white endive. You can, if you like, put a few spikes of red beet-root
between the quarters of eggs.

It is a
great improvement to rub the salad-bowl with a bead of garlic, or you can rub a
crust of bread with a bead of garlic, and toss this lightly about in the salad
when you mix it.

In the new millennium, lo! Curly endive
suddenly reappears in Australasian cuisine—and you’ve certainly been able to
buy it in the Australian supermarkets for some years, now: far too coarsely
leaved (not having been tied up when growing to blanch its heart), and then martyred
in tightly tied bunches. The cookery gurus are still not sure what to do with
it, though.

“This French classic usually made with lardons of bacon and a
poached egg is given a light touch with crispy pancetta and a vinegary garlic
dressing.”

French classic?? Where do they get these ideas from? And by the way, “vinegary” is right: if
you use “1/4 cup (60ml) white wine vinegar” to “2 tablespoons extra-virgin
olive oil” you will taste nothing but vinegar!

Two years later Epicurious.com favours
us with: “Escarole
with Bacon, Dates, and Warm Walnut Vinaigrette,” from Bon Appétit, February 2011, by Myra
Goodman and Sarah LaCasse. If it takes two of them to produce it, it ain’t
gonna be good—rule of thumb. “Escarole” is an American word for curly endive, and
the Americans produce several varieties of it. At least this recipe, over-elaborate
though it is, knows a bit more about vinaigrette dressing: here it’s “1/3 cup
walnut oil or extra-virgin olive oil” to “2 tablespoons red wine vinegar”. I
thought the salad might be quite edible, up to this point:

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